How Much Does It Cost to Teach English in Korea?

It’s Vanessa’s Thursday post, about a certain country you might be sick of hearing about. Sorry in advance, but not really.

Hello! As you’re reading this, I’ll either be in the air somewhere, or in San Francisco, eager to land in Seoul after the longest flight I’ve ever taken on the biggest plane that I can imagine. Despite moving my entire apartment, sorting through a TON of stuff, packing and repacking my suitcase to a disgustingly tiny 50lbs, someone here at the popular Financial Uproar blog insists that I write a Thursday post. What’s more, he tweets this:

No blog post today, on account that I have to move all my things. Try not to weep the entire day.

Administrative fees including money order costs and visa application fee came to $86

The grand total comes to… $468.27. That’s the minimum of how much it will cost to teach English in Korea. I took a Korean language course and a TEFL course as well, which boosted my costs to $1090.62. These two courses, while optional, allowed me to get two job offers which resulted in a higher than average salary.

THIS is how you decide whether education is worth the cost — research the market ahead of time, look at the value of the skills you’ll have at the end and leverage those skills into a higher paying job. Running off willy-nilly and getting degrees and diplomas with no examination of the job market is foolish and is why people end up under-employed.

Let’s do a cost-benefit analysis, shall we? With today’s exchange rates, my monthly salary comes to about $2600. My pay packet also includes an apartment which provides me a net benefit of $500 (my rent cost in Calgary). Base income (excluding pension, bonuses, etc.), comes to $3100 — a $700 increase on my monthly Calgary salary. At this rate, I will only have to work one and a half months to recoup my initial outlay — everything else is $$$ in my pocket!

Or, looking at it another way, that’s a return of 800% annually. That’s not entirely accurate because I’ll have to work for it, but you get the idea.

2 Comments

My cousin is currently living in Korea, she got married to an American guy. Her husband is a teacher, he teaches English in Korean college student. She told me that her husband makes a good money every month.